Timeline and Landscape: A Case Study of Visualizing the Evolution of Science Communication Research Front

Research Fronts are clusters of documents that tend to cite a fixed, time invariant set of base documents. In a specialty, research fronts are considered as major topics that most researchers are interested in. This paper plots the research fronts in science communication as timelines and landscapes for visualization. Timelines and landscapes, as new techniques of mapping knowledge domains, take advantage of a set of data processing and querying technologies based on Matlab and database prior to those based on text and memory. A set of data, collected from the reputable journal named Science Communication from 1994 to 2007 are used to manifest the dynamics and evolution of science communication research fronts over time. The mapping techniques are based on finding ‘research fronts’ consisting of groups of papers clustered using bibliographic coupling. Timelines of research fronts, two-dimension maps, show the specialty dynamics over time. Landscapes of research fronts are three-dimension plots with many peaks rising one after another over time. Landscapes show the panorama of research fronts in science communication, and comparison of various research fronts over time comes to be easier in fact. Such information will provide some references for technology forecasting and further knowledge development.